[420 Girl]

A Supreme Court ruling Monday allowing police to frisk passengers in vehicles stopped for a traffic violation, even if the passenger isn't implicated in anything illegal, has law enforcement officials and defense attorneys in El Paso discussing the ruling's pros and cons.

According to the Associated Press, the ruling states that police officers have leeway to frisk passengers even if nothing indicates the passenger has committed a crime or is about to do so.

The court unanimously overruled an Arizona appeals court that threw out evidence found during such an encounter, which involved a 2002 pat-down search of an Eloy, Ariz., man by an Oro Valley police officer. The officer found a gun and marijuana.

The Associated Press reported that the pat down is allowed if the police "harbor reasonable suspicion that a person subjected to the frisk is armed, and therefore dangerous to the safety of the police and public."

El Paso police Chief Greg Allen called the ruling "broad to a large degree," and said he saw both sides of the issue.

"In police work, when you stop and look at the profession as a whole, you see that we sometimes operate in the gray," Allen said. "I support the decision, but only to the degree that I think the officer must articulate always the facts of the case, but to where the individual in society doesn't lose their rights. There always needs to be justification for what a police officer does."

However, El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles said he was glad to see that the ruling sided in the officer's favor.

"I definitely agree that traffic stops can be some of the most dangerous situations for peace officers because they're coming in contact with vehicles and people they don't know," Wiles said. "There's a lot of unknowns as far as those people may have just committed a crime."

The ruling "is a good message to peace officers that they have that ability to protect themselves," he said. "It seems reasonable to me that an officer, with reason to believe that someone might be armed, can conduct a pat down to make sure the passenger in the vehicle, as well as the driver, is not armed."

Briana Stone, director of the Paso Del Norte Civil Rights Project, called Monday's ruling "bad" but not surprising.

"I don't think it's a surprise that most law enforcement would be in favor of it because it broadly expands their power," Stone said.

But she said the ruling goes against what the framers of the United States Constitution intended in establishing the Bill of Rights.

"This is exactly what they were trying to avoid. We're actually returning to the practices that were at the base of why we have the Fourth Amendment (which protects people from unlawful searches and seizures) in the first place," she said.

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